Loved. The fever breaks.
42. BLOOD
The yellow sunlight with
The milky moonlight makes
An egg without cholesterol
And I will live.
O tree of brains
And sound of leaves.
The day is green.
And now I pray.
I thank the cotton
For the shirt.
I thank the glass that holds me
In, that I see through into out there.
I’m driving to the car wash
And the dogs are getting haircuts
And the motorcycles drive by
And I ask for mine,
My body in your hands
To live.
The bay is blue
To me means that.
The saline breeze says that
The soft is firm enough today
To hold the water up
With gulls on top that won’t
Sink in.
I don’t know when.
I don’t know how.
I don’t know I.
I tell the cardiologist that
I’m in love.
The needle draws the champagne
Into crystal flutes the lab will love.
43. HOLLY ANDERSEN
I describe you.
I have a chart to.
I hold your
Heart. I feel.
The motor
Of your life
Is not diseased or weak
Or real until
I stress it from the
Outside, how
You test anyone before you
Find them true.
Totally in
Your power,
The stethoscope
Puts its taproot to your chest, and flowers.
The miles of
Treadmill agnostically
Takes core samples.
The bolus which jump-starts us back to life is love.
The light leaps and is living
On the screen
As the mine-detector mechanism
Looks for mines.
Take a deep breath.
You stopped smoking cigarettes.
Breathe out through your mouth.
How many years ago.
We are made of years
That keep on living.
We are made of tears
That as your doctor I can’t cry.
44. AT NEW YORK HOSPITAL
I enter the center.
I open the book of there.
I leave my clothes in a locker.
I gown myself and scrub in.
Anything is possible that I do.
Cutting a person open
Is possible without pain. An entourage rolls
In a murderous head of state with beautiful big breasts—
Who is already under and extremely nude
On the gurney. Her sheet has slipped off.
Her perfect head has been shaved
Bald. And now a target area
On the top of the skull will
Be painted magenta. Her body is rewrapped.
Her face gets sealed off. Her crimes against humanity
Will be lasered.
I am a Confederate scout, silence in the forest.
The all eyes and stillness
Of a bird watcher has stumbled on
A Yankee soldier asleep.
The dentist’s drill drills a hole and
The drill slips and whines out of control,
But no matter. The electric saw cuts
Out a skullcap of bone.
The helicopter descends from Olympus to within an
Inch of touching down
On the wrinkled surface, when a tool falls incredibly
To the floor and I pick it up and am thanked.
The anesthesiologist for my benefit joyously
Declaims Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The surgeon recites a fervent favorite childhood hymn.
He slaps the monster tenderly to wake her up. Wake up, darling.
45. DRINKS AT THE cARLYLE
The pregnant woman stares out the spaceship window at space—
But is listening carefully.
The man is looking at the inward look on her face.
The man is answering her question while they leave the galaxy.
Why they are on this space voyage neither stranger quite knows.
There is something that
Someone watching them
Might feel almost shows,
But would not be able to say what.
She was describing the American child
She was, the athlete who played the violin,
Who grew up on Earth upstate.
He sees American thrust, the freckled ignition
Who vanished in a puff of smoke on stage—and the power and
Grandly pregnant happily married woman physician
There on stage when the smoke cleared. He looks at her left hand
And her bow hand. He sees the child lift the half-size violin
From its case, and take the bow,
And fit the violin to her shoulder and chin,
And begin to saw, sweetly, badly,
While she asks him what it is like to be him,
To be a space commander, revered.
He stares softly at her severed
Connection to him as she again looks inward
And very distantly smiles
While he tries to think what she is asking him and answer.
She is smartly dressed in black,
Blond midnight in the air-conditioned hot middle of summer.
She has smilingly said she is the only doctor in town on
Fridays in July, so she knows everything.
It is amazing what people actually do.
I am not possible to know.
46. CHIQUITA GREGORY
Sagaponack swings the Atlantic around its head
Like an athlete in the windup for the hammer throw.
It is a hurricane and the radio
Predicts a tornado will follow.
The air violently
Smells fresh like nowhere else,
And I am just assuming it is
You calling to everyone lunch is ready.
We are heads bowed
At our place cards. Zeus is saying grace
When the chairs begin to shake and lightning outside
Shazams you back to life, tsunami
Light as a feather, the feather of life,
Very long legs,
Very short shorts, a chef’s apron in front, so that from
Behind … Goddess,
You have returned to earth in a mood and
In a storm, and I have no doubt that
Irreplaceable trees on Sagg Main are davening
Themselves to the ground. They
Rend their clothes and tear their hair out out
Of joy. Chiquita, how can anyone be so
Angry who has died? The whirling light in
The drive is the police, here
To urge the last holdouts in houses near the
Ocean to leave. To help us
Decide, they suavely ask for the name of next of kin.
The ocean bursts into towering flames of foam.
The lobsters in the pot are screaming
Inside the reddening roar.
Your aproned ghost keeps boiling more, keeps boiling more,
And turns to serve the gore.
47. TO START AT END
To start at End
And work back
To the mouth
Is the start—
Back to the black hole
That ate the meal,
Back from the universe
And the book
To the illiteracy
Of the much too
Compressed pre-universe
To release. So it was
The
hands of fingers on
The keyboard bringing up on the screen
The something thirteen
Billion light-years back that happened,
The Gentlemen, start your engines!
That made it start,
Which is the mouth
Of the music.
The uncontrollable
Is about to happen—
A gash in the nothingness invisibly
Appears.
The uncontrollable is about
To happen—the strings (of string theory)
Are trembling unseen ecstatically
Before they even are touched by the bow.
It all happened so fast.
The fall weather was vast.
At either end of spacetime the armies massed.
Youth was past.
48. WE HAVE IGNITION
Infinity was one of many
In a writhing pot of spaghetti.
One among many
Intestines of time.
The
Trembling the size and color
Of boiled lobster coral
Was trying
More violently than anything
Could and still live. The
Subatomic particles
Were
The truth. One of them became
The universe at once
While the others fled.
And one—
Not our universe—
Became something else.
Don’t think about it
And you won’t.
The landmass of the continental
United States compared to an open
Manhole
On the bitter boulevard where citizens buy crack
Is how much bigger the human brain is
Than the entire universe was at the start,
When it was the prickle
Before the zit.
Godspeed, John Glenn.
Fly safely high
In your seventy-seven-year-old
Head thirteen billion years old.
49. ETERNITY
A woman waits on a distant star she is traveling to.
She waits for herself to arrive.
But first she has to embark.
3, 2, 1 … ignition.
All systems are go for the facelift.
Her face lifts off into space.
She heads for the distant star
And the young woman waiting for her there.
A man who wanted to look better
But not younger is red
Swells of raw.
Later they will remove the staples.
Ten weeks later
They are younger.
They pull over
Their head a sock of skin.
One day the girl sees in the mirror a girl
Laughing so hard her face falls off in her hands.
You can see the inside of the face.
The front of her head is an amputee’s smooth stump.
Her old woman’s body is a bag of spotted slop.
The gentleman at least is doing fine.
His face peeks through the shower curtains
Of his previous face.
In the tomb air
Of the spacecraft they get more perfumed
As they painstakingly near
The hot banks of the Nile, so green and fertile.
Heart is safe in a dish of preservative.
Face is a box for the telemetry for the journey.
Perishable slaves caravan the monumental blocks of stone to the site.
The faceless likeness deafens the desert.
50. THE MASTER JEWELER JOEL ROSENTHAL
What’s Joel
Got to do but let the jewel
Hatch
The light and hook
It to the flesh
It will outlast
And point the staring
Woman at a mirror?
The stone alone was fireworks
But is Star Wars in his choker.
Of course Joel wears no jewelry himself but
Makes it for these reasons rhyme.
The staring woman is starving and
Eating her own face and
Stares with a raving smile
At her undying love.
The things they
Have to have
Are his
Designs on them.
The richest in the world stick out their necks
And hands and ears for JAR’s gems—
Which they can ride through the eye of a needle
To heaven. His genius is his
Joy, is JAR, is
Agonized obsession, is death is double-parked
Outside the palace. Death is loading in the van
The women and camels of King Solomon it is repossessing.
Joel has designed a watch
In platinum.
This watch is the sequel
To anyone you have ever lost.
51. IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING
I had a question about the universe
On my way to my evening class,
Stuck between stations on the No. 3 Express,
And it was this.
You don’t know what you mean
And that’s what I mean.
God is playing peekaboo,
Not There behind the hands.
Then peekaboo and you
See face-to-face and bam.
I’m getting old.
I hid and I revealed myself.
All the way down to the wharf
All the way down to the wharf
All the way down to the wharf
He-wolf and she-wolf went walking.
Shut up, darling! I’ll do the talking.
All the way down to the wharf
All the way down to the wharf
The stalker was stalking.
The talker was talking.
You want to talk
Until I droop.
The river runs by
Under the broken pier.
All the great ocean liners left for France from here,
Whose passengers are
Now ghosts mostly. Loup and Louve howl
To Neptune from their heaving gale-force stateroom—
Walk through drought, walk through dew,
Keep walking down the avenue,
For richer for poorer, for better for worse, malgré tout.
52. SPRINGTIME
Sunset rolls out the red carpet
For Charlotte as she walks
To her appointment with life
In the awed soft-focus.
Charlotte sees the crimson trees
With her famous eyes.
Fat rises to the surface of the street in sunset flames.
The magnolias are vomiting brightness
In the mist. Spring in its mania refuses
To take its medication. It
Buys every newspaper left on the newsstand, then
Sobs in a café, sobs with laughter.
A car at a light rocks from side to side with the
Windows down, letting in red, letting out rhythm—
A pounding pulse of rap from the exophthalmic car radio.
She would give anything to be able to
Sleep in a shower of this fragrance.
She is talking on her fear
Phone to anyone in her mind. She is
Saying in a red city
I am alive at sunset.
Charlotte is beautiful but
Charlotte is so beautiful it is
Insolence.
A fan
Asks for her autograph outside a restaurant.
Horse carriages slowly carry
Honeymooners through a fog of love as thick as snow.
A slave to love
Kisses a real slave she bought to free.
The dominatrix is whipped by her slave—
Who has made a mistake on the new rug and wags.
53. SUMMER
Kitsy and Bitsy and Frisky and Boo
Stream by, memories of moist
Moss—green morphine—
On each bank of a stream.
Fronds as delicate
As my feelings present
Those summers.
You could drink the water you swam
In, clear, cold, sweet, but August,
But August in St. Louis,
But August and the heat
That slows the green smell of the lawns
To tar, lyric
Of humidity
That thickens to a halt, but sweet, that swells
Up, that you escaped to dreams
From. In one,
Beauty and kindness combined
To walk across a room.
The daughter of Colonel Borders, Kitsy,
Means God has found a way, walks in through a door.
The universe begins at once.
The stars erupt a sky
They can be stars in, that they can be
Unicorns in a pen in.
The perfect knight in armor to slay the fiery dragon
Has sex with it instead.
I wake from the dream in the dark.
I barely see above
The steering wheel at twelve years old.
The park at night is warm.
The air is sweet and moist and cool.
54. FALL SNOWFALL
The book of nothingness begins
At birth.
The pages turn and there
Is far.
There is far from where
They start.
The pages turn into
The book.
And everything and everyone and
What is happening
Is blood in urine.
Ask the trees
The leaves leave.
They are left.
They remove their wigs.
They turn themselves in.
They stand there blank.
The now falls
On the fields white.
The smell of wood smoke stares and
The no falls,
Radios
Of blank now
On the fields.
A black crow shakes the no off.
Merrily we
Go around circling
The drain, life is but a dream.
The doctors in their white
No
Fall
On the fields.
55. CHRISTMAS
My Christmas is covered
With goosepimples in the cold.
Her arms are raised straight
Above her head.
She turns around slowly in nothing but a
Garter belt and stockings outdoors.
She has the powerful
Poems 1959-2009 Page 13